


dramatic things

by leah k (blinkiesays)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 15:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blinkiesays/pseuds/leah%20k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John walks into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and is grateful for the uncharacteristic lack of body parts within.  She says, mostly to herself but partially to Sherlock in case he's in one of his helpful (well, slightly helpful, well, more helpful) moods, "We're out of milk again."</p><p>She closes the door to the refrigerator, turns and finds Sherlock standing well within her personal space.  She jumps, a little.  It's not the proximity, she rather likes Sherlock in her personal space these days, it's just that she didn't hear him come up.  It's unnerving.</p><p>"Would you not-" she starts, already exasperated and it's only half past seven.</p><p>"You're pregnant," Sherlock interrupts. </p><p>  <em>Wait, what?</em> </p><p>"Wait, what?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	dramatic things

**On Being Flatmates with an Insane Genius**

February 8, 2011

_The problem with living with Sherlock Holmes is that he always knows things about you before you do.  Forget keeping secrets from other people, cohabitate with Sherlock and you can't even keep things from yourself.  There's no pretending that you haven't gained a few pounds or believing that your club's going to win the League this year when they're really rubbish._

\--

John walks into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and is grateful for the uncharacteristic lack of body parts within.  She says, mostly to herself but partially to Sherlock in case he's in one of his helpful (well, slightly helpful, well, more helpful) moods, "We're out of milk again."

She closes the door to the refrigerator, turns and finds Sherlock standing well within her personal space.  She jumps, a little.  It's not the proximity, she rather likes Sherlock in her personal space these days, it's just that she didn't hear him come up.  It's unnerving.

"Would you not-" she starts, already exasperated and it's only half past seven.

"You're pregnant," Sherlock interrupts.

Wait, what?

" _Wait, what?_ "

Sherlock doesn't repeat himself because he's Sherlock and she obviously heard him.

"How do you know?" she asks, reflexively.

"You don't actually want to know that," he says.

She really, really, doesn't.

He's going to be right, of course he's right, he's always bloody right, John knows that.  If Sherlock explains how her hair or fingernails or the way she dressed this morning indicated to him… something… he'll be _undeniably_ right and she could use a little deniability.

She cannot possibly be pregnant.

"I'm going to throw up," she says.

"No you're not, you're not far enough along for that," Sherlock says.  "You've only been pregnant since last Thursday."

She doesn't even remember last Thursday.  She hasn't been getting a lot of sleep recently.

"Wait," she says. "I can't be pregnant, I'm on-"

Suddenly she remembers last Thursday.

Sherlock is wrong, for once.  She does throw up.

* * *

**The Butler Did It**

February 3, 2011

_This last week has been more than a little crazy, which is why this update is coming so late.  To date, Sherlock's adventures have lost me four handbags, six pairs of shoes, and more than a little bit of dignity.  But never mind all that because for once I got to play the hero!_

_It was late Thursday night when we received an anonymous tip regarding a high-society to-do that was already in progress…_

\--

"Hurry up, why are you being so unforgivably slow?"

"Oh shut up I can't find my…" She trails off, digging through the pile of circuit boards covering the living room table; Sherlock is distracted and impatient enough the he doesn't finisher her sentence for her, which isn't a great sign.  What she can't find are her birth control pills, she hasn't been able to for a couple of days.  She can't remember the last time she saw them.  Tuesday?  It must have been.

"Oh," she says, dread pooling in her gut.  "The Thames."

Sherlock looks at her, says, "Oh good, you've figured something out with that inefficient brain of yours, lovely, can we go?"

John doesn't sigh or glare, because what's the use?  She grabs her coat and the purse she borrowed from Mrs. Hudson two days ago after her last one was swept away in the bloody Thames.

She never keeps her pills in her purse for this exact reason; in the last six months alone she's lost four handbags in increasingly ridiculous, difficult to explain situations.  The bag itself was no great loss (a gift from Harry and hideous) and neither were most of the contents: her credit is bad enough the cards are hardly worth replacing and Sherlock illegally has spare copies of her ID on hand _anyway_.  Besides her meds, the worst thing she lost was a bag of crisps she'd really, desperately wanted to eat.

She'll just have to remember to use condoms.  She's only a few days from her next period, anyway.

"Yes!" she yells, "Fine!  Let's go!"

Unfortunately, _where_ they go is right into one of those cases that involve everyone getting shot at quite a lot.  Usually it's Sherlock who puts himself in the way of too much harm for too little reason, but this time John is the one doing something dangerous and potentially stupid and almost having her head blown off for her troubles.  She does save the 14-year-old heiress, though.

Afterwards, Donovan sees her in the mess of cops and flickering lights and says dispassionately, "Oh good you're alive.  From where we were standing, it looked like you'd been shot in the head."

If John hadn't over-balanced and fallen backwards at the right moment, she would have been.

Donovan says, "And here I thought Freak couldn't get any paler than that."

John glances at Sherlock when he finally looks up from yelling at Lestrade.  He meets her eyes, barely acknowledges her, and flaps off, presumably to look for a taxi.

Lestrade looks in the direction where Sherlock was looking, finds John and flashes the Mycroft-contrived signal for _watch him tonight_.  John feels more than a little confused, but nods anyway.

Sherlock in the cab on the ride home is more manic and less self-satisfied than usual.  He sends a spate of text messages, from what John can see solving at least three outstanding NSY cases just to piss off the responsible DIs.

Once he's done with that, he slightly turns towards John and makes the face he always does when he really wants people to ask him what he's thinking.

"Yes?" John obliges.

"For one second it did appear to me that you had been shot in the head at very close range."  Sherlock pauses unnaturally, and then continues, "Of course you weren't.  I knew precisely from the speed of your fall, the velocity of the bullet, the angle of your head, and so on."

Sherlock must have been standing next to Donovan whilst John was stupidly chasing the butler across the rooftops.  John didn't realize.

"You thought I'd been killed?" John asks.  Sherlock doesn't respond, which is as good as a yes.  "It's not like you to be that wrong," she says.

Sherlock huffs, "I was only wrong for a second."

Mrs. Hudson greets them at the door with the usual flurry of, "I saw it on the telly," and, "I was worried," and, "Oh John what have you done to your hair."  John finally catches sight of herself in the hall mirror, sighs.  She didn't notice in the melee, but she seems to have singed off a good three inches on the left side.

Mrs. Hudson says, "No matter, I'll trim it up for you in the morning, luv."

Before meeting Sherlock, her hair was a good six inches longer.  She should get a preemptive buzz cut to save Mrs. Hudson the trouble; she'll have one anyway by Christmas at this rate.

Sherlock declines the offered cup of tea, guides John up the stairs with a warm hand on the small of her back.

She crosses the threshold into their flat, throws her coat over the back of a chair and says, "Are you hungry?  We've still got that cake thing Harry sent."

Her mobile chirps.

"RE: THE CASE OF THE VAINGLORIOUS VALET  
A humble suggestion for your next title.  
I am glad to hear you are still alive.  I worry.  
Mycroft Holmes"

John smiles, puts her phone down on the counter.

"Not hungry then?" John asks, and when she glances up at Sherlock again he's staring at her like he hasn't seen her before.  For some reason, he's looking at her like he doesn't know anything about her, which is absurd; he knows _absolutely everything_ about her.   Sherlock Homes is easily the world's foremost expert on Johanna Beth Watson, M.D.  Last she'd asked, he remembered her lipids count.

"Sherlock?" she asks.  He doesn't say anything and she turns back to the kitchen because the rush of adrenaline's wearing off and her blood sugar is about to crash into a metabolic brick wall.  She takes two steps towards the refrigerator before she's spun around by a hand on her shoulder and pulled into a fierce, unexpected kiss.

John knows empirically that she's not attractive right now: she's got bags under her eyes from having hardly slept this week, she's wearing an ugly beige jumper because she was freezing cold when she got dressed this morning, and she smells like burnt hair.  This doesn't seem to deter Sherlock, who's shoved both hands into her back trouser pockets and is pushing her unsubtly towards the bedroom.

Sherlock usually approaches sex like it's something that happens to him (like the weather changing or the post arriving) that he happens to enjoy but has little control over.

This is new.

"Sherlock," she gasps, breathlessly.  "I need to, there's something-"

 _Shit_ , there's something she was going to tell him, something that he doesn't actually know.  She just can't remember right now what that could be.

Sherlock gets her jumper off and puts his hand on her sternum for a long moment, still looking at her like she's something he doesn't understand.  Her heart feels like it's trying to do a backflip in her chest.

 _Sod it, it can't be that important_ , she thinks.

* * *

**The Ginger Cat**

February 17, 2011

_I do wish Sherlock would find ways to test his hypotheses with less property damage._

\--

Store bought pregnancy tests aren't really effective until a week after you miss your period, so John waits eight anxious days and then buys three of them.

"Absolutely unnecessary," Sherlock says when he sees her return from the grocer.  "I can tell from-"

John shouts, "SHUT UP RIGHT NOW," because they've been down this path more than once this week and John's still scarred from the mention of the word mucus.  "Call it corroborating evidence."

John slips into the bathroom, surveys the pastel-colored boxes with dread.

The poisonous part of her brain that is forever comparing her to Irene Adler suggests this would have never happened to _her_.  She has probably never lost anything in the Thames in her life, though obviously she's almost been shot in the head more than once.  Her pathetic, rational jealousy of Irene is tempered only by one fact: when Irene asks Sherlock to have dinner, he doesn't respond and gets confused; when John says to Sherlock, _Let's get dinner_ , they go and get a curry.

Irene certainly knows some sort of sexy, elegant, interesting and alluring way to pee on a stick.  John doesn't.

Two hours, one blue plus sign, one filled in pink circle, and one digital read-out saying _PREGNANT_ later, she emerges from the bathroom.

"I told you they were unnecessary," Sherlock says without even looking up.  She nearly says, _I wish I had half your confidence_ , before realizing with an inner lurch that she does, somewhere.

"I'm pregnant," she says, out loud.  It's the first time she's really owned up to it.

"And now we both know something I figured out last week, bravo."

John glares and pushes down the urge to kick Sherlock hard in the shins.  So, even though her world's been tilted over on its axis, that's all the same.

"Turns out that night was much more life-affirming than I originally thought," she says.

Sherlock actually looks embarrassed.

John stopped picturing herself as a mother some 10 years ago, when she'd committed herself to being an army doctor.  It wasn't a career path that played nicely with ballet lessons and juice boxes.  Other women she knew didn't think that way, and she saw privates and corporals and sergeants under her command or under her care get pregnant, get married, and get out (usually in that order).  It took getting _shot_ to force John back to England, to the so-called normalcy other people she knew craved.  But even in the relative comfort of London, the phrase _settle down and have a family_ didn't really apply to the life she lead.  The time commitment and danger level were improbably _far worse_ than the bloody army.

"Alright," she says. "We'll turn the upstairs bedroom into a nursery."

"Paint it purple," Sherlock says. "It's a girl."

John is startled into a laugh.  "You can't know that, you cannot possibly know that."

"You can't know that I don't know that." Sherlock raises an eyebrow. "And I have a 50/50 shot at looking brilliant."

"And a 50/50 shot at looking like an ass," John says. "You can stop trying to impress me any time now." She lets herself collapse onto the sofa. "Oh God, what if it's like you?  I'm not qualified for that."

Sherlock pulls a face.  "You can't do worse than our mother.  Just look at Mycroft."

John completely loses it laughing, has trouble catching her breath.  Sherlock looks at her from across the room and he's looking at her like she's something interesting.

John's hand drifts so it's resting over her belly, between her hip bones.  Inside somewhere her body is building a creature that's half her, half Sherlock.  It's a daunting thought.

John loves Sherlock, she honestly does; it's more of a sign of mental illness than her phantom limp or hand tremor ever were.  So _she's_ certifiable, _he's_ a high-functioning sociopath, and now, God help them, they're going to have a baby.

She'd say something, but that's when something in the kitchen explodes.

* * *

**The Hounds of Baskerville**

March 16, 2011

_We parted company and I wound up interviewing Louise Mortimer, Henry's therapist.  It was nice to talk to someone normal for a while, even if Frankland arrived and ruined it all.  There are just some things that, despite all his deductive powers, Sherlock will just never know anything about.  Like women._

\--

The kitchen exploding meant something significant to a case they were working on, so they never really got around to talking about the whole _so we're going to be parents_ thing.  And in the intervening weeks, she hasn't brought it up.  She just doesn't want to have a serious conversation about the future with Sherlock while he's holding a harpoon and covered in pig's blood.

She tells herself she's just waiting for the right moment, but their whole life is a series of wrong moments, more or less.  So February melts into March and besides suddenly having to stop every once in a while to be violently ill in the bushes, not a lot changes.

At some point Henry Knight swans into their flat and they get an all-expenses-paid trip to the countryside.

\--

John wanders around Dartmoor in the dark for a long while, feeling angry and completely alone.  She finally winds her way back to civilization, such as it is here, and on instinct goes for the nearest pub.

John walks up to the bar at the Cross Keys, desperately craves a glass of white wine and orders a club soda with lime instead.  Buying a non-alcoholic beverage at a bar at her age is practically a neon, flashing sign that reads _I AM PREGNANT, ASK ME HOW_.  She's not very surprised when the brunette on the stool next to her asks her how far along she is.

"Six weeks," she says.  Five weeks, five days, and some odd number of hours, really.  Sherlock's got it to the second but that's just being perverse.  John's not sure what all's crept into her voice, but some anger or bitterness must have wormed its way into her tone because the woman at the bar raises an eyebrow at her.

"Usually this is where I say congratulations," she says. "But I don't think it'd be appreciated.  Want to talk about it?" She gestures with a shoulder at a quiet table in the corner.

John feels a little like she's being chatted up, but she does in fact want to talk about it.  Only Sherlock knows; John's been carrying the knowledge of it around like a terrible, heavy secret.

"Yes," she says, probably sounding desperate.  "Yes, please."

The woman turns out not to be chatting her up (good news, because _tell me about your miserable pregnancy_ sounds like a terrible strategy in the first place) but instead she's a psychiatrist named Louise who can't help herself when she meets interesting cases.

"Psychiatrist, ok," John says.  "Well the father's practically a walking dissertation looking for the appropriate researcher and peer-reviewed journal."  John ticks Sherlock's various psychological diagnoses off on her fingers and Louise's eyebrows go from half-raised all the way up into her hairline.  She takes a sip of wine instead of saying something right off.

Eventually she gestures towards John's half-empty glass of club soda.  "No problems with intimacy, I gather."

John half-laughs and says, "Obviously not, no.  That was a shock."

John conveys a highly edited version of the events surrounding their latest blow-up (hell dogs excluded) and Louise makes sympathetic noises at all the right places, begins dissecting Sherlock's motives when John gets a text message.

"You're talking to Henry's psychiatrist."

John ignores it.

Sherlock texts again.

"Stop talking about me and ask her something useful."

John writes back, "FUCK OFF," but knows she's going to end up doing it anyway.  It's probably Sherlock's way of apologizing that he's bothered to leave them alone this long.

Louise gets a little suspicious when John clumsily tries to transition from talking about her problems (well, problem, she really just has the one, live-in problem) to talking about Henry Knight.  John fails miserably at pretending to be an old friend because apparently something Louise is working on with Henry is his difficulty befriending women at all.

Louise asks, "Why do you think I'm going to talk about this?"

John flails for something else to say and settles on the truth.  "Because I think you're worried about him," she says.  "And because I'm a doctor, too.  And because I have another friend who… might be having the same problem."

Louise, who is smart and interesting and should live in London so John can look her up for drinks sometime, puts two and two together quickly.  She starts to say, "Do you mean to say the father-"

And then Frankland comes by and smashes their tentative camaraderie apart.

"How's the investigation going?" he asks, loud, bombastic, probably drunk.

"What investigation?"  Louise asks.  She looks betrayed, John feels crestfallen.  "You're _investigating_ me?"

John says, "It wasn't like that.  Well, it wasn't like that until Sherlock texted just now-"

Frankland perks up.  He asks, "Sherlock?  Is he here?"

"No," John says.  Sherlock? In a pub?  Ha.

Louise finishes her glass of Pinot Grigio, sets it down on the table harder than the glass really deserves.  She asks, "All this, your sob story and that, was just so I'd tell you about Henry?  Where are your ethics?"

It's the absolute wrong thing to do, but John can't help laughing at that.  Her ethics had been critically wounded in Kabul and died a quick, painless death shortly after meeting Sherlock.  She still hasn't bothered to tell the police that she killed that homicidal cabbie, and she'd done that before she even properly _moved in_.

Frankland leaves, eventually.

"Well you found yourself another doctor," Louise says, grabbing her coat.  "Maybe he'll write that paper for you.  He seems keen on experiments and _investigations_."

John finishes her club soda in silence, aware that at this point she's just sulking.

\--

Eventually, she slinks up to their room and crawls under the covers without bothering to brush her teeth or even take off her bra.

 _Fucking Sherlock Holmes_ , she thinks, and laughs.

When people realize that she is _still with_ Sherlock, that she hasn't wised up by now, they ask her why.  Why do you put up with it?  Why do you stay?  What's in it for _you?_

Sherlock talks to her when she's not there.  She's recorded it before, set up a sound-activated device before she left to see Harry for a weekend and came home to hours of Sherlock saying, _John did you know, John could you bring me, John what is that smell,_ and so on.

Sherlock seems to really only know one name.  He calls everyone _John:_  man, woman, or indifferent.  Women are insulted on principle and men become insulted when they discover that, in this case, John is a girl's name.

Sherlock checks with her when people look at him oddly, takes her advice on when to shut up, when to say thank you, when to stop smiling at a crime scene.  He tries to fix it when he disappoints her and he chucks things out of the fridge when she asks him to.  He plays the violin quieter when she has a headache and he doesn't tell her the answer to her crossword puzzles until _after_ she asks.

John's not actually stupid, she knows what it all means.

She's half asleep when Sherlock finally makes it into the room.  He doesn't apologize and she shoves over to make room for him on the bed anyway.  She can't really help it, because even if he's a right dick all the time, Sherlock loves her.

She knows, she's always known.  It's a secret she keeps to herself, even from him.  He's smart enough; he'll figure it out eventually.

\--

Halfway through watching Lestrade interview the restaurant owners about the dog, John rushes outside to be violently sick.

Sherlock ignores her, he's seen her vomit loads of times by now; he's actually grown bored of analyzing it.  Lestrade, though, follows her out looking concerned, says, "You doing alright?"  He pops into the hotel for a minute and comes back out with a bottle of water.

John likes Lestrade.  She'd absolutely be better off if she'd let Lestrade knock her up instead.  He's a stand-up guy, which is harder and harder to find these days.  Lestrade would probably make a great father.

He just wouldn't be Sherlock.

John rinses her mouth out with the water and spits.  "I'm fine," she says. "Just something I ate."  It's a particularly thin lie, considering it's a vegetarian restaurant and she can't quite claim bad oysters or underdone poultry.

All of this is why she feels bad for Lestrade, later, when Sherlock drugs him with Henry Knight's sugar cubes and locks him in the creepiest part of Baskerville.

"Oh, don't do that," Sherlock says.

"Do what?"

"That empathy/guilt thing you're doing because you feel like you have to.  The drug's practically harmless," Sherlock says. "I'd have used it on you if not for your… condition."

John glares at Sherlock for a long moment before going back to watching Lestrade wander, unaffected, through an empty lab.

Lestrade calls, eventually, sounding unaffected and sane.  "What is that growling?" he asks, and she can see him on the video monitor holding up his mobile.  "Do you hear that?"

"You're going to have to let him out of there eventually," John says, after Sherlock hangs up, disappointed.

"He's not exhibiting any of the effects," Sherlock says.  "There's nothing there, it doesn't make any sense."

"It's not the sugar," John says. "You got it wrong!  You were wrong, it wasn't in the sugar, you got it wrong!"  She knows she's crowing, enjoying it too much, but it's been a bloody hard weekend and she threw up _again_ in the elevator on the way down.  She's started carrying _airsick bags_ in her purse.

"A bit," Sherlock says.  He looks like it physically pains him to say it.  "Won't happen again."

Though she's thoroughly enjoying herself now, she leaves him alone long enough to go to the loo.  On the way back she passes a row of test animals in cages and that's when she sees it out of the corner of her eye.  _The hound_.

 _It's not real,_ she thinks, _it's not real, it's not real_.  Jesus Christ, though, it looks real.

She breaks into a dead sprint, bursts back into the control room, and locks the door behind her.  Sherlock jumps up, knocking his chair over.  She collapses back against the door, heart rate going through the roof, hands shaking.

"I've been drugged," she says, horrified.  "It's got me too."

Sherlock crouches down in front of her, grabs her shoulders.  He says, "It's alright, it's OK now."

"No it's NOT," she yells.  She knows her voice is cracking, that she sounds hysterical, she feels hysterical.  "It's NOT OK, I've been drugged.  If I've been drugged than _so has the baby_."  She feels sick, not usual morning sick, she feels dread like a cold, hard thing in her stomach.

Sherlock looks at her, he looks normal, no more and no less concerned than normal and John feels alone, so alone in her panic and worry.  "Get me a doctor," she says. "Get me a doctor _now._ "

\--

Dr. Stapleton says more than once, "I'm not a people doctor, you know," while she's checking John over.

John says, "Well, I'm not an expert in military-grade chemical weapons, so we'll call it even."

Dr. Stapleton takes her pulse, shines a flashlight in her eyes and checks her temperature with the back of her hand.  It's more like how John's mother used to diagnose her with strep throat than a real scientific inquiry.  "Your heart rate's up and your pupils are dilated but you're not exhibiting any other symptoms from the drug.  No fever.  If it's in your bloodstream you've probably absorbed most of it before it got to the little one.  You'd need constant, prolonged exposure to do any real damage," Dr. Stapleton says. "Besides looking peaky, I'm sure you're both alright."

"See?" Sherlock says.  "Practically harmless."  Thus satisfied that John's no longer freaking out quite as much, he then kicks them out of the lab.  John hears something glass smashing as they leave.

John spends 20 minutes pacing in the hallway, discussing child rearing with Dr. Stapleton while Sherlock's presumably running around in his mind palace.  John likes to think she's not going to be the kind of mother who'd murder her daughter's pet rabbit, but who knows.  She used to think she'd never break into top-secret military facilities.

Sherlock finally bursts out of Dr. Stapleton's lab and summons them back in, then brilliantly solves the whole thing.  John shoves Sherlock away from the computer terminal, reads everything she can find about the actual chemical compound used by H.O.U.N.D.  The studies showed that there were no detrimental side effects, nothing lasting once it'd been metabolized and excreted.  She finally starts breathing normally again.

John's mobile rings.  She's surprised when she answers it, realizes it's Louise Mortimer.  John listens to Louise's panicked voice for a long, long moment, promises to get help.

It's this kind of moment that John let herself get addicted to when she was in the army.  The exact feeling of forgetting herself completely, letting adrenaline overcome common sense, and rushing head-long into who knows what danger.  There's no thinking involved, it's what they _do_.

They get to the moor, John shoots a dog, Frankland gets himself blown up, and Henry Knight gets the greatest gift of all: sanity.  All in all the night ends on something of a positive note.

As they're walking out into the cold, damp night, John's very tired and post-terrifying-event rattled, not thinking very clearly.  She turns to someone she thinks is Sherlock and says, "Even if the bloody _psychotropic mist_ is fine, this kind of stress cannot be good for the baby."

Lestrade looks from her to Sherlock (who's a good ten paces behind, talking to Henry Knight) and back again and then yells, "I bloody well _knew it!_ "

"Shit," John says.  Well, there goes no one knowing.

* * *

**Just Checking In**

April 9, 2011

_Been a bit slow these last couple of months.  Sherlock's been off and about on his own as I've been feeling more than a little under the weather recently.  Not to worry, he's still out there, scouring clean the mean streets of London._

**\--**

John comes home from her OB/GYN with a plastic bag full of brightly colored pamphlets and a printed-out ultrasound.

What To Expect When You're Expecting doesn't really have a section on what to do if the father's a high-functioning sociopath.  It's a shame, she could really use some documentation on _that_ issue.  Attempting to raise a child _with_ Sherlock Holmes will probably be worse than being a single mother could ever possibly be.  That's if Sherlock doesn't leave.

"Oh God, why are you crying?" Sherlock asks when he reaches the top of the stairs, confused the way he is at all human displays of emotion.  John loves him the most when he looks like this, God knows why; seeing him now just makes her sob harder.

"You didn't mention she was pregnant," Mycroft says.  Jesus, John's been crying so hard she didn't see him follow Sherlock in.  It's the hormones, it has to be; she wasn't this much of a mess when she got shot.

Sherlock looks at her for a long, perplexed moment before turning to Mycroft and asking, "Why is she crying?"

"Oh my dear," Mycroft says, settling onto the sofa next to her and holding her hand.  She must look _awful_ ; Mycroft is never this nice to her.

Mycroft pats her hand, takes in the pearl pink nail varnish she'd put on earlier.  "It's worse than I thought," he says.

"What is worse than you thought?  Someone tell me what is going on here," Sherlock says.  Usually when other people understand something that Sherlock doesn't he gets angry and throws a fit, but right now he sounds lost.

"Do you want me to tell him?" Mycroft asks.

John nods, unable to speak, though she's not completely sure what Mycroft means. 

Mycroft puts her hand down, stands and ushers an oddly silent Sherlock out of the flat.

\--

Sherlock returns, alone, half an hour later and by then John's managed to stop crying, wash her face, and put the kettle on for tea.  She's standing up by the stove, morosely working her way through a packet of biscuits when he arrives.

He says, "Mycroft tells me you want me to marry you."

John chokes on the biscuit she's eating, inhales a mouthful of sharp crumbs, and ends up doubled over the stovetop, coughing until there are tears leaking out of her eyes.  _That's_ what Mycroft got?  Jesus.

The kettle starts whistling and she puts tea on for the both of them, focuses on the mundane, usual movements lest she start crying again.

Sherlock says, "I see it now: the crying, the nail varnish. Obvious."

John looks at her hands.  She knows that Sherlock knows that the last time she painted her nails was when she'd learnt through Facebook that her ex-boyfriend Greg had gotten engaged.  The time before that was after the horrible self-esteem-destroying date she went on with Myron from the surgery and the time before that was well before she'd met Sherlock but some sort of romantic disaster had precipitated the event, surely.  They should have called the particular shade she uses _Bad With Men_ instead of _Malaysian Mist_.

John fills a glass of water from the tap, drinks it all in one go to forestall having to speak for a while.

"OK," she says when the protracted silence becomes unbearable, "Yes." She doesn't quite know why she continues to pretend conversations with Sherlock are like conversations she has with other people.  Sherlock hasn't actually asked a question, but she's answering it anyway.

This would be less painful if they weren't both wildly terrible at having and talking about Feelings.  They'd only ever had sex in the first place because she'd accidentally said yes without really understanding or caring what she'd been agreeing to.  Saying no to Sherlock took too much work.

This is the story she will have to tell her child if it asks how it came to be.  Sherlock's perfect recall has the conversation going like this:

"John, unconventional name notwithstanding, you are a woman, correct?"

"What? Oh, yes, last I checked."

"Brilliant.  We'll have to try it out."

"Yeah, sure, sounds like a great idea."

She only imagines, in retrospect, that Sherlock got the idea from prolonged exposure to Irene Adler.  As far as John could tell, Sherlock had spent 28 years uninterested in sex beyond an academic capacity and then he came back from a weekend trip to Ankara and all of a sudden he wanted to _try it out_.

John still doesn't know why he picked _her_ when Irene was obviously on offer.  Irene practically put out adverts in the paper about how much she wanted to fuck Sherlock, but Sherlock came home and propositioned John instead.

Though John had no idea what she was being asked at the time, she doesn't regret saying yes. After some practice, Sherlock became unexpectedly good in bed, even if he took notes afterwards, and John enjoyed herself enough that she never bothered to call it off.

So Sherlock had sex with her when he was bored instead of firing the bullets into the walls, John finally got laid on a regular basis, and Mrs. Hudson started thinking they were cute again.

"Fine," John says, filling the glass again to have something to do with her hands.  "I would like you to stick around if that's agreeable enough, 'til death do us part, and all that."

Sherlock blinks at her.  She doesn't like Sherlock when he's shocked into silence; he's so much more bloody attractive when he's being decisive and aggravating (which is almost always, when he's not asleep).

Sherlock says, "John.  You're-" He stops.  He looks nervous.  "I can't do this."

John's heart drops into her stomach and her stomach drops, too, for good measure.  "Oh," she says. "Oh.  Alright.  I'll go stay with Harry for a bit.  I'll be back later to-"

"Stop being so stupid," Sherlock snaps.

John freezes in place.  She doesn't understand when her life became a terrible novel, but here she is pregnant, face puffy from crying, being yelled at by the father of her illegitimate child.  She sniffs, is immediately horrified to hear it.  Hormones, _it has to be hormones_ ; Sherlock calls her stupid daily, it's never made her cry before.

When Sherlock said _I can't do it_ she'd been ready enough to up and leave, but now she's rooted in place.  Waiting.  She's reminded of poor Molly at the Christmas party, though John would probably shoot Sherlock if he kissed her on the cheek right now.  John wouldn't even go to prison for it; pregnant women play well with juries, she's seen studies.

Sherlock looks like he's about to say something when Mrs. Hudson bellows up at them from downstairs.

"Boys!" she yells, her sturdy heels thumping on the wooden staircase.  "Boys!  Come quickly."  John can hear the distant wail of approaching police sirens.

"Later," John says.  "We'll talk about this later."

* * *

**They Never Get Your Good Side, Do They?**

April 10, 2011

_I'll never get used to reading about myself in the papers, even if I'm just a side-note to Sherlock's latest grand achievement._

\--

She didn't get a nickname in the press, for which she was relieved.  She was certain she'd end up with some horrifying moniker like _Sherlette_.  Instead, on page five, column six, first sentence she's referred to as Sherlock's girlfriend.

 _Longtime_ girlfriend, even.

_Frequently seen in the company of longtime girlfriend Johanna "John" Watson._

At least they spelled her name right, though she always hated that nickname-in-quotes thing.  It implied people could call her Johanna and she'd know who the hell they were talking to.

It was probably an accurate description, though it felt odd.  How long, really, had she _been_ Sherlock's girlfriend?

She did used to try and date ordinary men, bring them round the flat.  It always flamed out whenever they met Sherlock.

If he was anyone else, she'd think he'd been chasing them off on purpose, but it's Sherlock.  Sherlock, who unconsciously hoards her attention, guards it jealously, and becomes petulant when she takes it away. It wasn't just that he revealed all the worst things about everyone he met out of habit, it was the casually possessive way he acted towards her. He'd ignore her dates entirely until she didn't answer a summons or respond appropriately to a display of Sherlock's brilliance, at which point he'd turn on the source of her distraction and rip it to shreds.

The most popular parting shots as they all stormed out were: _you said you didn't have a boyfriend_ and _your flatmate is a nutter_.

Bringing Jim the Boring Solicitor to the Christmas party had been the last of that experiment.  That had been the night when she'd finally given in to the fact that she couldn't balance a normal relationship with being Sherlock's _Girl Friday_.  After that, she stopped bothering to correct people when they assumed things about the two of them.  Everyone seemed happier and less confused that way.

But even now that she'd moved her alarm clock from the upstairs bedroom into the one off the kitchen, she didn't think what they did counted as _dating_.  That implied some sort of mutual commitment to the idea of a relationship as other people understood it.  

Sherlock was the main reason she got up in the mornings and the central unifying theme in her messy, complicated life, but normal terms like _dating, girlfriend, boyfriend_ \- they didn't really sum that up.  She associates those words with going on nice restaurant dates and getting ugly flowers and dirty text messages.  She'd break out in hives if Sherlock pulled that on her.

It was Valentine's Day a few weeks ago: John gave Sherlock the gift of not telling him she loved him and Sherlock gave her the gift of not remembering what day it was.

And it's not like she has a good lot of role models for what dating should be in her life.  John's parents violently hate each other, Harry's divorced, Mrs. Hudson's Mr. Hudson killed people in Florida, and Lestrade's wife is _still_ cheating on him.  It's possible that of everyone they know, Sherlock and John have the healthiest relationship.

Or did have, until Mycroft pulled the pin on the hand-grenade labeled _marriage_ , threw it into the flat, and ducked away for cover.  If she'd known _that_ was what Mycroft was going to tell Sherlock she would have told Mycroft to bugger off.

John sighs.  She says, "I want to apologize about yesterday."

Sherlock looks confused, still staring at the ugly hat Lestrade gave him.

"I never thought I'd be this old fashioned," John says, sadly. "I don't want to have a child without being married first.  It's logical, there are all kinds of legal reasons.  I should have started in with that, but I got wrapped around the axle emotionally and what came out came out."

Sherlock stares at her for what feels like an eternity; she can't even begin to fathom what he's thinking.

He says, "There's a car downstairs."  He turns on his heel and walks out of the flat.

John sighs, and grabs her coat.  This, at least, is familiar territory.

\--

They've been riding in surprisingly companionable silence for long, boring seconds when Sherlock finally says, "Love really is just a chemical reaction to specific stimulus."

John laughs, helplessly.  "I've had better chat-up lines from drunk hooligans before."

Sherlock doesn't laugh. He continues like she hasn't said anything at all, says, "I prefer chemical reactions over which I can exert some measure of control, but as you know I have an addictive personality."  John hates it when Sherlock smashes together two unrelated concepts into one sentence and doesn't give her time to catch up.  "There are drawbacks, I've found.  For one, you're filling up my hard drive."

John stupidly says, "But I never use your laptop." She knows as soon as she's said it that it's the wrong thing.  Sherlock looks at her disdainfully and sighs.

He taps gently against the side of her skull, says. "This hard drive."  She shoves his hand away.

"I'm doing what?"

Sherlock sighs. "Sentiment." He shakes his head. "Is as damaging and inefficient as I long suspected it would be.  In falling prey to it, I've opened myself to a number of vulnerabilities, such as decreased capacity in my read-only memory cache.  It's unlikely that the contents of your wardrobe ranked in order from most often worn to least will be vital to solving a crime, but nonetheless I have the information to hand."

John leans in to ask, "What do I-"

"The beige button-up shirt with the thin plaid.  Usually with a sweater.  You should also stop pretending you're ever going to wear the green dress.  See?" He scoffs.  "Sentiment."

John gapes, a little.  The green dress… he's right about the green dress, probably.

"What the hell does my green dress have to do with-"

"I can't delete anything about you!" Sherlock says, and the revelation sounds like it pains him, like he's admitting to being wrong.  "You have an entire wing in my mind palace."

"An entire wing?" John asks.  She's oddly flattered.  She supposes most people would find it creepy if someone with an eidetic memory had all of them stored away somewhere for easy reference.  John finds it charming. This is how they've lasted this long, probably.

Sherlock sighs.  "Yes.  You'd like it, though I suppose that would be the point."

John, who has finally figured out where Sherlock is going with this, goes straight from confused to smug.  "You're in love with me," she says.

Sherlock grimaces.

"Oh my God, you are! Well this is news.  I'm going to blog about this, Sherlock-"

"No you're not."

"Yes I am.  I'm going to take out an advert! The world should know."  John laughs and Sherlock doesn't, but this time he does that thing where he smiles because she's laughing.  Something in her chest that's been anxious and nervous since early February settles and quiets.

"Good God you used a lot of words to tell me that."

Sherlock says, "The customary ones seemed unsuited to my purpose."

John laughs again.  "Of course they would be."  Imagining Sherlock looking deeply into it her eyes and saying _I love you Johanna Beth Watson_ \- just the thought of it makes her giggle.  "Oh God, don't ever say them, that'd be horrible."

"Yes."

The taxi jerks to a sudden stop to avoid a cyclist.

John asks, "Where are we going?"  Generally she's stopped asking, but it seems important.

Sherlock smiles enigmatically, asks, "Why would I tell you that?"

He says, "Start as you mean to go on and all that."

John assumes he means: her clueless and slightly agitated and him all-knowing and insufferable.

"Sure," she says.  "It's worked well enough up to now."

This is how John ends up a surprise guess at her own wedding.

The Registrar, of course, is someone that owes Sherlock a favor (who knows why) and the witness is a member of Sherlock's homeless network that he spots on the way in.

Sherlock has a ring, just the right size, expensive looking and antique.  When he puts it on her finger it's blood-warm like he's been holding it in his coat pocket for ages. 

Sherlock says, "Let's not and say we did," at the _kiss the bride_ part, but still John feels giddy, dizzy, and drunk on sudden spikes of emotion.

As soon as they're out of the Registry Office she's got a text from Mycroft, who probably has some sort of BOLO out for exactly this kind of thing.

John says, "I'm afraid to look.  What if it says _welcome to the family?_ "

Sherlock leans deep into her personal space, says, "I promise my brother is only expressing his disappointment that you can no longer legally be compelled to testify against me."

"Is that was this was about?" John asks.

"Certainly not," Sherlock says.  "You've also complicated my tax forms."

Sherlock wages war against the tax code with unholy glee every spring.  She can only imagine what kind of tickboxes he gets to check off now that he's married to a disabled vet.

She says, "Only you would see that as a benefit."

* * *

**This Time The Banker Can See**

April 13, 2011

_I know Sherlock can't be bothered, but I, for one, was overjoyed to see the family happily re-united._

\--

John wakes up warm and comfortable before her alarm, light streaming in through the windows and Sherlock still in bed next to her.  He's awake, she can see his eyes open, and he's radiating barely restrained, nervous energy.  He's going to want something: a cigarette, a case, a shot in the arm, or her.

John likes it when she can make that choice for him.  She rolls over enough to turn off her alarm and then rolls back.  She feels the air next to her shift, knows Sherlock's smiling, can feel the way purpose settles his mind on to one clear path.  She's lucky, so so fucking lucky, that he still finds getting her off a challenge.  And she does get off, every time, no faking it with Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock pushes his hand low on her stomach, over the slight curve of her belly, like he's asking permission, like her whole body isn't practically shouting at him _YES YES YES_.  Sherlock deduces whatever he's going to get from her pulse, her body temperature, the fine lines around her eyes and, apparently, decides to just go for it.  He pushes his hand past the waistband on her ugly boring beige cotton underwear and thrusts two fingers up inside her without preamble.  She doesn't shout, but it's a near thing, her body curling involuntarily, shoving herself closer, close to him.

He says, "Interesting," and looks at her analytically and she knows, knows this is going to be written down in a notebook or filed away in his mind palace somewhere: her physical reaction to his fingers, how she looks right now.  She swears under her breath and grinds into his hand and he doesn't even have to work at it very hard before she's bucking and coming against him a minute, a couple minutes, maybe seconds later.

He pulls his hand back and looks at it, thank God doesn't tell her what he's thinking and she shimmies out of her panties and climbs on top of him.  He'd been so detached about sex, so uninterested before they'd started this experiment that the first time they'd tried it she'd worried he wouldn't be able to get it up.  She needn't have.

Sherlock likes her body, which she hadn't expected, but he doesn't like the usual, obvious places that men go for.  He likes to trace his hands over the knobs of her spine, outline her ribs where they show under her breasts.  He likes touching the backs of her knees and the arches of her feet.  The points of her shoulders.  He's catalogued every spare inch of her, the shape of her armpit and the back of her neck.  He likes the bullet hole scar in the front hollow of her shoulder blade and the matching exit wound on her back.

He saw the scars on her kneecaps and shins and perfectly described to her the traumatic experiences surrounding Harry teaching her how to ride a bike.  Any secrets she'd managed to keep from him had been revealed all at once the first time he'd seen her completely naked.  She was what she was: 34-26-36, 5'10", natural blond.

Sherlock had seen her, all of her, and understood her completely and had had _wanted her_.  Still wants her.

John lifts her hips and Sherlock lifts his and she shoves his pants down until they're tangled around his ankles and he glares at her and kicks them off.

John tries not to be jealous about how Sherlock, who eats terribly and is horribly lazy about everything has a much better body than her.  He has slim hips and lovely abdominals and she cannot seem to get enough of his cock, looking at it or inside her, it's perfect.  Sherlock naked looks elegant whereas she knows for a fact that she looks awkward and sturdy and occasionally overeager.

John braces herself over Sherlock with one hand planted on the bed and the other fumbling between them to line them up.  There's got to be a smoother, sexier way to make this go, but she's never worked it out.  What she lacks in finesse, she tries to make up in enthusiasm and when she feels him pressed against her, finally at the right angle, she pushes down, welcoming him as deep as she can have him.

He gasps, still after all this time shocked by his own pleasure in the act.  John loves the needy, surprised noises he still makes, is greedy for them, and grateful.

Sherlock says, "John," and she stops luxuriating in the feeling, starts moving.  Sometimes he takes over (like that Thursday night), sometimes he lies back like the selfish bastard he can be and takes what she has to give.  This morning, at least, she's feeling languid and lazy, moving up and down in a slow, easy rhythm.  His hand have migrated so he's gripping the sides of her hips.  She's still braced against the bed with her hand near his shoulder and so she leans in, slowly, and pulls him into a kiss.

Sherlock doesn't kiss in any other context.  Even if she'd thought that was weird before, she understands now.  Kissing her shorts out his ability to sense anything else, all he can do is taste and see and smell and feel and hear her.  He says it's like a sensory deprivation tank and sensory overload at once and he's useless as a detective for minutes afterwards.

So John takes the kisses she gets, tries to memorize every detail as they're happening.

Sometimes Sherlock will narrate, tell her what he wants, what she wants, what she's doing wrong and what they could be doing better.  Today, though, he's quiet, the pressure of his fingers telling her everything she needs to know.  John speeds up the rhythm of her hips, is rewarded by Sherlock brokenly saying her name.  His hands tighten, fingertip pressure on the verge of hurting, she'll have bruises later.

John grind against him, bites his jawline and her jerks into her, coming, she can feel his cock twitching and pulsing inside and she loves this part.  This is what she'll remember later.

She collapses all the way forward for long moments, then reaches under the bed where they keep extra flannels for this kind of thing.  She negotiates the rolling-off-pulling-out-not-ruining-the-bedspread bits and says, "I'm jumping in the shower, what do you want for breakfast? I was going to do eggs."

Sherlock takes an astonishingly long time to reboot after sex, so she's out of the shower and toweling her hair off before he finally yanks his pants back on and says, "Eggs sound fine."

She does scrambled, fries up some sausages of indeterminate age that she finds in the back of the freezer.   While she's eating and Sherlock's forgetting to eat again, she reads yet another article about the Reichenbach thing in the papers and at 1030 they get a call about a rich guy who's been kidnapped.

Just another normal day at 221B Baker Street.  She could get used to married life.

* * *

**Well That Happened**

May 1, 2011

_Don't read the papers!  Oh God you've already read them haven't you.  Fine, it's all true._

_I've turned off comments for this one, I'm afraid of what you lot have to say._

\--

She never though they were nearly famous enough that her name and the phrase _baby bump_ would appear in the same sentence in The Sun, but there it is.

**Sherlock Holmes internet detective:  human after all**

By KITTY RILEY

**DETECTIVE Sherlock Holmes seen out and about with pregnant girlfriend John Watson.**

_We didn't know he had it in him, but Sherlock Holmes was spotted having a celebratory meal at a trendy London eater after solving yet another high-profile case._

_The genius detective was accompanied by partner Johanna "John" Watson, who was seen wearing a pair of gorgeous diamond cuff links by Cartier.  Just the kind of quirky accessory you'd expect to see on a woman who insists on going by John!_

_Lest you think she's not really all woman, Watson was also sporting a three-month baby bump.  Sources close to the couple confirm that that they're expecting their first child in the fall._

_For this net 'tec at least, looks like crime (fighting) does pay after all!_

John's mortified.  On the day that picture was taken, they'd spent hours and hours running around London after the damn Yakuza and she'd been so hungry she was almost nauseated.  When they passed by a restaurant she'd never heard of before and Sherlock said they owner owed him a favor John had said, "We're going in, we're eating something, _no words from you_."

For all their recent notoriety and the lavish, useless presents they got from grateful clients, they were still flat broke.  Sometimes getting a bloke exonerated from a double homicide was the only way they ate at all.

Sherlock reluctantly ate a dinner roll and John had a £30 steak, all paid for by the Moroccan carpet fibers found near the dead bodies and the exact time of day that the Tube station near the crime scene was busiest.

She hadn't expected the bloody paparazzi positioned outside when they'd left.

She's violently embarrassed that the article mentions the cuff links.  She still doesn't really own _nice things_ and when Lestrade had warned them they'd probably make the news again, she'd grabbed them off the dresser.  It was her one, brief sop to vanity.  She wears men's shirts most of the time because they're more comfortable, doesn't wear make-up or high heels ever.  She doesn't even have pierced ears for Christ's sake.  The Sun photographer that spotted them had managed to get her shirt cuffs and the slightly convex curve of her stomach in one shot and that was the picture they used, of course.

The words _sources close to the couple_ make her nervous when she reads them again.  The only people who really know about the baby are Mycroft and Lestrade and a handful of PCs at NSY.  (You can only boot up into so many potted plants before the less incompetent ones start putting things together.)  Besides that, there was Louise the psychiatrist in Dartmoor and that was it.  That was absolutely _it_ and John wouldn't really call any of those people close.

"Have you seen this?" she asks, holding it up. "I'm going to get phone calls."

Sherlock says, "That's not a terribly flattering picture of you."

John throws the newspaper at him and avoids her phone for the rest of the day.  Her vow of silence lasts only until she checks her e-mail and finds out from a Google alert that The Sun has also gotten a hold of a copy of their marriage certificate.  _Shit_.

\--

For a week John's life feels like a badly scripted soap opera.

On Monday Harry shows up on their doorstep upset she wasn't invited to the wedding, won't take _there wasn't a wedding_ for an answer and threatens to throw John a baby shower.  John's forced to recount the whole thing in detail, tries to make a surprise civil ceremony witnessed by a wino sound as lovely and romantic as possible and fails miserably.

On Tuesday they have to stop by St. Bart's to replenish Sherlock's collection of mold spores and Molly tries to put up a brave front but ends up losing it completely.  John spends an hour with her in the ladies' lavatory at St. Bart's petting her hair and comforting her while she cries.  Molly's anguish seems to boil down to different variations on, "I thought he wasn't capable of love, but he just isn't capable of loving _me_."  John tries to talk her around to the idea that being with Sherlock is kind of just as awful as not being with Sherlock.  It's mostly true, but Molly doesn't buy it.

On Wednesday Mrs. Hudson comes up to do the dusting and informs them that she's been knitting a baby blanket and baby booties and various other pastel monstrosities that John will have to accept without cringing when she's finished.  She also refers to herself, more than one, as _Gramma_.

On Thursday they help NSY resolve a hit-and-run and Lestrade informs her he's won some sort of NSY pool that's been running about them since the whole pink lady thing.  John points out that he's engaging in illegal activities unbecoming a Detective Inspector and he tells her to shut it, the take was almost five hundred quid.  John resolves to piss off fewer police officers; Sherlock resolves to piss off more.

On Friday John paints the upstairs bedroom purple and buys a crib and a baby monitor.  She does pre-natal yoga in the morning and Sherlock predictably gets kicked out of a Lamaze class in the afternoon.  When she goes to bed that night, she finally lets herself believe that she won't be a terrible mother and that Sherlock will be an alright enough father that he won't completely fuck it all up.  Children have come from stranger and turned out more or less fine, just look at Prince William.

* * *

**Trial of the Century?**

May 11, 2011

_There was video evidence, expert witnesses, no one bothered to mount a defense and Moriarty was still found innocent.  Can anyone explain to me what just happened?_

\--

Only Moriarty could make John nostalgic for constant, unrelenting nausea, but at least if she was throwing up all over the place it'd be an excuse to get out of the courtroom for a while.  Moriarty's dead-eyed stare is starting to get to her.  It's getting to the jury, too, if she's reading their nervous, twitchy energy correctly.

After the testimony from the security guard Moriarty maced and before the promised witness stand account from the head of security for the Tower of London, the judge calls a recess.  John rushes to the toilet because even if she doesn't need to vomit, she still has to pee _all the damn time_ now.  She knew the mechanics and all from the OB/GYN rotation she had to do at St. Bart's, but it takes practical experience to really understand how much being pregnant destabilizes your whole system.  It'd be fine, even somewhat enjoyable, getting fat and wanting odd flavors of chips all the time, if she didn't have to deal with new and exciting pressure against her internal organs _all the time_.

John is washing her hands and cursing Sherlock and his freakishly potent sperm (it _would be_ brilliantly good at its job while simultaneously making John miserable, wouldn't it) when she spots a slightly shell-shocked redhead at the sink.

"You've been accosted by Sherlock, haven't you," John says.  The woman looks up at her, startled.  "I recognize the signs.  He's called you something awful and made you feel stupid, and all the while he's made himself look brilliant.  I know what you're thinking, you're not sure if you want to punch his face in or cry."

The woman says, "Yeah, well, yeah that's pretty dead on actually."

"Having done both on more than one occasion, you're probably better off just getting a stiff drink and practicing selective amnesia," John says. "And you can't take it personally, he'd do it to the Queen.  If we'd spent any more time in Buckingham Palace than we did, he _would have_."  John's still glad the only real damage from that visit was the stolen ashtray.

The woman smiles faintly and John asks, "Don't I know you?  I've seen you in the section with the press?"

"Kitty Riley."  She holds her hand out and John shakes it before she remembers she hasn't toweled off very well and her hands are still damp.

"You're John Watson. I've asked around about you," Kitty says. "You do this a lot, don't you?  Cleaning up after he's made a mess."

John mutters, "Everyone needs a hobby, right?"

John recognizes the name, feels her face heats up, and blurts out, "Those weren't my cufflinks."

Kitty laughs a little at that, smiles in a way that almost reaches her eyes.  "I never said they were."  After a moment her face pulls down into a frown, and she says, "You should keep him on a shorter lead, keep him from biting the other dogs.  It's going to get you both in trouble someday, he does it to someone he shouldn't."

There's an ominous foreboding to her words that John feels right through to her core.

Kitty says, "Best be getting back."

John nods, feeling unsettled about the whole conversation.

It doesn't occur to John until much later to think it's strange that The Sun's sent a two-bit gossip writer to cover the trial of the century.

\--

It's a comment on the state of her life that getting trucked off to strange, posh places by Mycroft's henchmen has actually become mundane; on most days it's actually more boring than aggravating.

When she accidentally kicks up more of a fuss than is really warranted by just bloody well asking for Mycroft, the men that come in to drag her away are visibly bewildered by a) her gender and b) her increasingly obviously distended stomach.  They look like they'd been sent in to forcibly frog-march her away, but are being unexpectedly hindered by some lizard-brain unwillingness to manhandle pregnant women.  Eventually, after some epic, completely silent conversation between the two of them, they maneuver one to each side of her and gently lead her away touching nothing but her elbows.  They drop her off in a room full of old books, dark wood paneling, and well-kept plants.

Mycroft doesn't bother to actually look at her when he says, "Tradition, John, our traditions define us."

John snorts.  She says, "I don't like traditions at places like this, they tend to bar me from even entering the _front door_."  She sighs.  "I'll give that total silence is one I've not run up against before.  You can't even say pass the sugar?"

"Three quarters of the diplomatic service and half of the front bench all sharing one tea trolley, it's for the best, believe me."  Mycroft, who hasn't been actually paying her his full attention, finally turns and when he sees her he looks startled.  He quickly recovers, though, says, "We don't want a repeat of what happened in 1972."

She's not a genius detective, but she knows the Holmes men quite well now and they're not very clever at hiding their surprise.  It happens to them so rarely, they just can't have had enough practice.

"What is it?" she asks.  "I took off the nail varnish."

Mycroft's kneejerk reaction to everything is to be horribly condescending, so what he says is, "Of course you did, my dear."  He doesn't go on.

She makes an unhappy, frustrated noise, and collapses into one of the ornate leather armchairs.  She picks up a newspaper long enough to read the Kitty Riley byline and thinks, _Moving up from the gossip column I see_.  John puts the paper down and says, "Come out with it, will you?  My back hurts and I get enough intrigue at home, thank you."

Mycroft says, "Yes, I suppose you do."  Not for the first time John wonders if there's a Mrs. Mycroft or a Mr. Mycroft somewhere, if anyone's ever volunteered for that thankless task.

"I didn't know Sherlock kept it," Mycroft says, finally.  "Our mother left him that ring.  Family heirloom; I dare say priceless."

Priceless.  Well it figures.  Sometimes John wishes she'd had the kind of upbringing that makes you as thoughtlessly careless with valuable possessions as Sherlock is.  "He didn't say."

"He wouldn't, would he?  I'd always assumed he'd had it melted down out of spite.  I'm glad he didn't, it suits you."  John stares at it, looking at it in a new light.  She'd assumed old and expensive, but had apparently missed _how_ old and _how_ expensive by a wide mark.  She'd just liked it because it wasn't ostentatious and it didn't look massive and obvious on her freakishly skinny fingers.  Initially she'd worn it on a chain around her neck, but now that they whole bloody country new about their secret marriage, well, she'd put it on her finger again and mostly forgotten about it.

"Well now that that's out of the way," she says. "You cannot have possibly dragged me here to appraise my jewelry.  What is going on?"

Mycroft goes on to explain about their new neighbors.  John, in return, throws a fit and blames it on hormones.

She steals a scone off the tea tray on the way out.  It's the best thing she's eaten in months.

* * *

**Untitled**

June 16, 2011

_He was more than my best friend and I'll always believe in him._

\--

"Leave a note, leave a note when?" John asks, frantic.  This cannot possibly be happening.

"Johanna Beth Watson," Sherlock says.  John's eyes snap up to look at him and sheer, bloody, cold terror seeps into her veins.  "The customary words still seem unsuited to my purpose.  Goodbye."  He throws the mobile away and jumps and her heart stops.  She faints nearly dead-away on the spot and when she comes to she can barely see his overcoat through the crowd of doctors and nurses and onlookers.

"I'm a doctor, let me come through, let me come through please," she says, everything ringing and spinning in her ears.

"He's my husband," she says. "He's my husband, please."

She catches sight of him and grabs his hand, cold, before she's pried back and away.

* * *

**Well**

February 16, 2012

_I'm sure you've read all about it on the more reputable news sites out there, but I'd just like to say for the record that I was right. I was bloody right._

\--

John's leaving work on the sunny side of a 12-hour graveyard shift when her mobile chirps with a message from Lestrade.

John's night had included two women with broken arms and menacing, dead-eyed boyfriends, three cases of projectile vomit, and one point in which John had nearly fallen whilst slipping on a pool of blood.  She's in no bloody mood for Lestrade's vague, "Need a favor."

She sends back a half-hearted, "Piss off."  She's not moving his couch again; it looks fine where it is.

She ignores his next three texts: "You want to see this," "You really want to see this," and "I'm not lying about this." The message after that, a picture of an overturned lorry accompanied presumptuously by GPS coordinates, is so like something Sherlock would have sent that looking at it makes her heart seize a little and she finds herself turning towards the taxi station instead of the tube entrance.

Mrs. Hudson calls a moment later and says not to worry, she'll look after Violet.  John thanks her automatically and hangs up before it dawns on her that Lestrade _called Mrs. Hudson assuming John was coming_ , even though she hadn't said so yet.  She's so angry at the realization that she stops walking completely and for a second she cannot see or breathe past the tidal wave of blackout-inducing rage that washes over her.

She says, " _That little shit_ ," out loud and begins furiously pawing at the touch-screen to get back to their text exchange when she gets the notification of a new text, "You're running late already." 

She storms right up to the taxi stand in a fit of indignation, deciding that if she's going to tell Lestrade off, she's going to do in person.

\--

The crime scene is a large, blocked off corridor of highway and since all traffic is being diverted, she has to get out of the taxi and hike about half a mile to get to the perimeter.

Once there she asks the bored-looking uniform on watch where she can find Inspector Lestrade and he responds with a vague hand-wave towards the jackknifed Lorry and provides the exceptionally unhelpful direction, "Through there."

John regrets immensely that she's wearing a dress when it becomes apparent that the only way to get to Lestrade is to crawl on her hands and knees.  In mud.

"Am I being punished for something?" she asks no one in particular.

The assembled uniformed officers look on, unsympathetic and unanswering, as she ties her hair back and hikes up the long, trailing hem of her skirt.  She laments for a brief second the pale, knobby-ness of her knees before she gets down to the ground as gracefully as possible and scrabbles through the mire to the other side.

She thanks various deities that her tetanus shots are up to date, stands up, wipes mud off her face and says, "Greg, what the bloody hell did you call me out here for?"

She then finally bothers to look around, sees Sherlock, and promptly faints.

\--

When she wakes up he's still there.

Later, when she tells this story a million times to their daughter, she leaves this part out:

"I'm going to kill you," she says, and launches herself out of the mud and past Lestrade, tackling Sherlock to the ground with one hand wrapped around his neck.  Sherlock looks predictably unperturbed.

"I'm going to bloody well kill you," she says again, though actually what she _does_ is burst into tears.  God, she can't even blame hormones anymore, but just feeling him, solid, real, breathing under her hands is overwhelming.

This part she does tell Violet:

"You're alive," she says, very slightly choking on a horrifying mixture of snot and saliva.

Sherlock says, "Yes."

John asks, " _How long have you been alive?_ " and can't take it back once she's actually processed what she's said.

Blessedly, Sherlock fails completely to acknowledge she's even spoken and says, "I need you to look at the markings on the victim's body."  He voice sounds a little squashed and she finally pulls together the presence of mind to remember she's lying on top of him with her fingers slightly compressing his airways.

She gets to her feet, awkwardly elbowing Sherlock once or twice in the process.  Once she's up and gotten her bearings, she looks around again, takes in the assembled detectives, uniformed police officers, crime lab techs, all of whom are justifiably staring at her.  She spots, too, the dead body, which presumably once belonged to the driver of the upturned lorry.

Sherlock resurrected, unexplained marks on a dead body, police staring at her like she's from Mars.  She thinks, _must be a Sunday_.

\--

When they're finally alone together the first _real_ thing Sherlock says to her is, "Violet Holmes?  I'm surprised."

John punches him.  She can't help it.

While Sherlock's staring at her with a wounded expression, she hisses, "If you wanted to have a say in naming her you shouldn't have _faked your own death_."

And that's when Violet starts crying.  John goes and picks her up and paces with her, alternating between cooing sweet nothings at her and glaring daggers at her father.

"And anyway, I didn't pick it out," John says, grasping for something to say that isn't what she really, desperately wants to say.  "My family comes up with horrible names for girls and then pretends they're boys anyway and your side of the family comes up with deranged names like Sherlock and Mycroft.  Mrs. Hudson came up with it and it stuck and _you weren't there_."

Violet Holmes was born at 7:23 AM on Monday the 5th of November at St. Bart's.  Mrs. Hudson called a taxi to take John to hospital and got in after without being asked.  Molly had been on shift in the morgue and came up over her break.  Lestrade dropped by as soon as he could get away from the scene of a double homicide.  Mycroft, who had unexpectedly cast himself in the role of doting uncle, couldn't be there for reasons he was not at liberty to say due to the Secrets Act but he sent an aide who bullied the nurses and doctors into doing things for John that she was too exhausted to ask for herself.

From the second Violet was born it was clear she was Sherlock's daughter.  John had looked at her and knew rationally there was some Watson in there somewhere, but John only saw her pale, pale eyes and sharp features.

John had cried a lot that day, out of a horrid mix of joy and wretched, clinging sadness.

"I assumed you'd name her _Violet_ ," Sherlock says, like it was an obvious and predictable conclusion, which it really hadn't been.  "I just didn't think you'd name her _Holmes_."

" _Of course_ I'd name her Holmes.  I never stopped-" John says, cutting herself off. 

She hadn't even taken off her wedding ring.

"Oh go on," she says, instead.  "Tell me other things about me you cannot possibly know, I know you're dying to.  Tell me what's new."

Sherlock smiles his real smile, the one that other, not-John people don't really get to see.

Sherlock says, "You're not sleeping, probably my fault.  Nightmares, also my fault.  You let Harry come by more than you'd like because you borrowed money from her and can't afford to pay it back yet, but you don't trust her alone with the baby.  Mycroft's offered you fiscal stability, he would, wouldn't he, but you've turned him down because you're still too stubborn and prideful and he's too rich and Mycroft.  Good to know that hasn't changed."

She'd had a choice between Harry and Mycroft, and she chose Harry.  The emotional interest rates were higher, but the idea of being in Mycroft's debt made John itch.

"You're recently taken on a new job - night shift by the state of the windows.  You would have missed the excitement with me gone so my guess is emergency room physician.  Am I right so far?"

John makes a vague, non-committal noise, though of course he's dead on.

Sherlock looks at her, really stares her down like she's an active crime scene.  He says, "Besides the day Violet was born, you haven't cried at all."

John had gotten through the six months or so mostly by telling herself that she'd have the nervous breakdown the next day.  _Today's not good_ , she'd think to herself, _I've got to do laundry today or Violet will have to go naked, everything she owns is covered in spit-up.  Tomorrow's good, I'll breakdown completely tomorrow_.  And then on the next day she'd have to get a plumber in to fix the sink or she woke up late for work and was in a rush all night and she put it off again.

If she was busy enough, some part of her brain just blithely assumed Sherlock was out of town on a case and she didn't think about it.  It was only when she closed her eyes and tried and failed to sleep that she thought about it, that she saw the fall over and over and over again, hundreds of times.  Violet waking up wailing was usually a relief, something to break the tedium of persistent insomnia.

Sherlock says, "You never actually believed I was dead.  And now you're angry with me."

There's a difference between knowing something and believing it.  Most people know Jesus couldn't actually walk on water, but they still believe he did anyway.  John knew, with certainty, that Sherlock was dead.  She just never _believed_ it.  Not for a second.

And yes, of course she's angry.

"You left us, Sherlock," John says.  "Even after I made you _marry me_ to prove you wouldn't."

Sherlock says, "You didn't make me do anything.  Couldn't."

True enough.

John says, "A text would have been nice.  Something along the lines of _I'm not dead_ would have been a start."

"You would have been in danger if I had.  Not just you," Sherlock says.

"What happened up there?" she asks. "What really happened?  Don't tell me that you faked your death just to prove to everyone how really, truly clever you are.  I couldn't bear that."

"I can't tell you," Sherlock says, "But I had a very good reason."

"Well good job at it, you made it bloody well convincing," John says.

Sherlock looks smug, like, _I did, didn't I?_

"You haven't deleted me, have you?" John asks.  She's been afraid of what Sherlock's been through, if he's changed.  Just because she's been pathetically locked in a holding pattern doesn't mean _he_ has.

Sherlock, though, grimaces and says, "Not even the awful way your hair smells when burnt."

"That could be useful to a case, someday," John offers.

"It won't be."

Violet stirs, reaches out and balls her hand into a tiny fist against John's jumper. 

John says, "Here, you take her. You're partially responsible."

She'd thought Sherlock would look strange holding a baby - and he does - but not nearly as much as she'd imagined.  You wouldn't call him a natural, but he doesn't look confused, disgusted, or inconvenienced.  That's the fear she's stored up since she saw him again - since he first told her she was pregnant, really - that he'd look at their child the way he did everyone else.  That he'd treat Violet like she was uninteresting, beneath his notice, part of the general background noise, what he considered transport.  Until now, the only ordinary person he _didn't_ think of like that was John, but she was the grand exception and still had no idea how she'd managed to break through his customary wall of disinterest.

John's a little jealous that Violet's managed the same effect without working at it at all.  Mostly, though, she's relieved.

She looks at them, and abruptly all the anxiety, the barely banked anger, and the crushing despair she's been carrying with her for months leaves her.  She feels dizzy, untethered and unsupported, and has to reach out and brace herself against the table.

Sherlock continues to stare at Violet, oblivious, as John feels paralyzed, powerless to move or speak, only able to take in deep, rasping breaths and pray she isn't going to faint.  The feeling passes after a long, drawn out moment, her breathing finally coming easy, even. 

Suddenly she's aware that she's _desperately hungry_.  It's as though her body was full and satiated on the feelings of fear and want that had been her constant companion these past months and without that toxic sustenance was finally starving for something real.

She's _hungry_ , and hungry seems so strangely _normal_ , hungry seems boring and everyday and uncomplicated.  She could almost cry with relief to feel something so average and normal and not bone-crushingly sad.

"I'm starving," she says at last. "Are you in the mood for something?"

Strength returned, she stands up and grabs her coat off the back of a chair.

"There's a place round the corner that opened up since you've been gone, does a great takeaway lasagna.  I'm going to run down and pick some up, maybe a bottle of wine, shouldn't take a minute.  You going to be alright with her?"

Sherlock nods absently, says, "Yes, fine, go."

When she's halfway out the door he calls out, "Don't ask after the owner's son, he just ran off to join the army.  Touchy subject."

Sherlock, of course, can't know that. 

He does anyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Leonard" by Sharon Van Etten


End file.
